​This week the Trump Administration opened a new office called Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) so Americans could report victimization at the hands of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement called “criminal aliens.” The office, and its 1-855-48-VOICE hotline for reporting “alien” crime, are widely seen as part of a propaganda effort aimed at depicting immigrants as violent and dangerous. (VOICE officially targets “illegal aliens,” but Homeland Security secretary John F. Kelly said that the perpetrators were “often” in the U.S. illegally, leaving room for legal immigrants, students, and tourists to be included, too.) Anyway, the internet was unhappy with the rather transparent attempt to create a climate of fear (real crime rates among immigrants, legal and illegal, are lower than for the general population, according to the FBI), so many did the most logical thing and took the government literally. They started calling in reports of UFO sightings, space alien abduction, cattle mutilations, etc. After all, they’re “aliens,” too. ICE was not amused.

“Their actions seek to obstruct and do harm to crime victims; that’s objectively despicable regardless of one’s views on immigration policy,” an ICE official said in a statement reported inThe Atlantic.

Actually, it’s pretty much the opposite. It’s using one dumb idea to demonstrate the vile underpinnings of another, and that is hardly despicable. If the government truly cared about crime victims, it would put its money into providing actual victim services at the local level, where they are needed, rather than creating a flashy hotline to garner ecstatic headlines on Fox News, talk radio, and the right-wing blogosphere. You will note, for example, that the government placed this office within ICE rather than the Justice Department, and limited its efforts helping victims connect to local resources only to crimes committed by immigrants. Apparently other types of crime are unworthy of the same extraordinary outreach.

But the calls reporting UFO activity did remind me about a story that ran in the New York Times this week about a Syracuse couple who have taken it upon themselves to develop an index of UFO sightings in the United States, grouping reports geographically and by shape of object for the years 2001 to 2015. There are 371 pages of charts and graphs, but no narrative account. The book is called U.F.O. Sightings Desk Reference, and it contains data collected by MUFON and NUFORC. The authors are Cheryl and Linda Costa. The former you will remember as the local alternative newspaper UFO columnist. The other is a longtime devotee of the International Fortean Society, according to the author notes included in the book. Both claim to have had several UFO encounters.

Compare their self-descriptions to how the New York Times described them: “The authors are Cheryl Costa, 65, a former military technician and aerospace analyst, and her wife, Linda Miller Costa, 62, a librarian at Le Moyne College and a former librarian at the National Academy of Sciences, NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.” The Times wants to minimize their involvement in fringe causes to grant them greater credibility.

While the book seems at first glance like a worthy endeavor, there are of course a number of problems that stripping the data to charts and graphs does not solve. First, because it starts with the assumption that reports of observations of any object in the sky fall under the rubric of UFOs, it means that the data almost certainly contain misidentified aircraft and astronomical events and some outright lies. This would distort the resulting charts without some methodology for sorting out what we mean by “UFO.” In the book, the authors, in a weirdly casual way, state that they believe that “like under 6%” of their data actually refer to extraterrestrial spacecraft. They note that they made no effort to vet the reports because to do so would take too much time, and they blamed the government for being “unwilling to take responsibility” for evaluating whether a given UFO sighting refers to alien spacecraft. So what is the purpose of the book? “We note that short of solid CSI evidence, eye witness (sic) testimony can get you convicted in any court in the country.” On one page they both concede that their data is at least 94% noise, and that they haven’t attempted to vet any of it, but that it is enough to “convict.” Awesome.​The Costas include several pages describing themselves as “outraged” at the government and at elite scientists for failing to take UFOs seriously, and they explain that they prefer to surf the internet for UFO reports than to investigate whether any of them can be confirmed with evidence.

According to the authors, UFO sightings have spiked dramatically between 2001 and 2015, rising from 3,479 to 11,868. In the very last line of the article, the Costas reveal the most important point: “In the end, the Costas noted, the spikes may have a lot to do with media coverage.” In other words, when cable TV starts in on a wave of UFO shows, like in 2004-2006 and again from 2010-2014, more people report seeing UFOs. What a shock. The Costas say they are doing “scientific work,” but the problem is that the “data” that they collected tell us nothing about what is or is not flying around in the sky. Because it is simply a chronicle of witnesses’ self-reports, it only tells us what people think they are seeing, where they think they are seeing it, and how many people are envisioning alien spacecraft in various shapes, sizes, and colors. It is a chronicle of psychology, perhaps, but not a useful set of data on what flying saucers are doing in our skies.

Still too early to say. Nonetheless keep in mind that history (esp. incl. Venona) has taught us that McCarthy was right. A lot of people choose to ignore that and I find that fascinating. I guess it's a worldview thing.

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flip

4/28/2017 10:06:39 pm

@Americanegro

I guess my modern history university class was wrong then? It's been a while, but as I recall McCarthyism was mostly a witch hunt with very little actual proof behind it; scaremongering, rather than a real threat. Hence my referencing it...

Americanegro

4/28/2017 10:51:41 pm

Where did you matriculate, Communist Martyrs High School? Ever heard of the Pumpkin Papers? Do you even lift, bro? It was literally in all the newspapers. Like I said, it's a worldview thing.

"The Venona documents indicate that there were perhaps a dozen Soviet agents in the State Department alone."

"The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught."

"The sum and substance of this growing body of material is that: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in June 1953 for atomic espionage, were guilty; Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment was guilty; and that dozens of lesser known persons such as Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon and Harry Gold, whose innocence of the accusations made against them had been a tenet of leftist faith for decades, were traitors or, at the least, the ideological vassals of a foreign power."

"When Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Mo. in March 1946, Truman immediately disavowed the former British prime minister. Astonishing as it may seem to those who get their history from movies and TV, the American president invited Joseph Stalin to come to Fulton and give a speech presenting his side of the story. Truman actually offered to send the battleship Missouri to fetch the Soviet tyrant."

It's a long article so I suggest you give it a browse. It's from the Washington Post, hardly a right wing rag.

David Bradbury

4/29/2017 02:20:49 pm

The problem with McCarthyism was not that there were no reds under the beds, but that the cure was worse than the disease.
The problem with Trumpism, on the other hand, is that Trump and other manipulative businessmen ARE the disease.

Clete

4/28/2017 06:20:35 pm

No, Trump is the new Bozo the Clown.

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Americanegro

4/28/2017 04:35:01 pm

"They're murderers, they're rapists, they're sex apes..."

I've seen a UFO but that was before 2001. It would be interesting to know how they decided on the start date for their ... what is it? their "collection of questionable data"?

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CACosta

5/8/2017 09:52:27 am

We choose 2001-2015 because the data prior to 1999 was very unstable and minimal. We also decided that a nice crisp snap-shot of the 1st 15 years of the 21st century reporting data would be a good study sample.
From 1960 to 1999: the data from both MUFON and NUFORC amounted to fraction of the 2001-2015. General availability of Broadband connectivity greatly impacted sighting reporting in the late 90s. Again that was another deciding factor in choosing to sample 01-15 data for our study. CACOSTA

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Only Me

4/28/2017 04:38:29 pm

So, the Costas openly admit most of their data is inconclusive, yet they're "outraged" neither the government nor top scientists take UFO reports seriously. And they don't see the problem with both statements.

Right.

Kind of like fringe proponents that attack academics at every opportunity, but turn around and claim they'd *love* to work with the very people they attack.

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Palpie

4/28/2017 09:53:36 pm

Not much ancient in tonight's ancient aliens. Mostly just 20th century ufo bullshit.

The only evidence of aliens i saw was georgio's hair's continued attempt to escape his head.

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terry the censor

5/2/2017 08:54:09 pm

> eye witness testimony can get you convicted in any court in the country

Off-the-shelf rhetoric that marks a thoughtless UFO proponent.

It is my understanding that evidence at trial is subject to tests such as cross-examination. When the UFO claimants can get their evidence tested in court, then they can use that tired old line.

Jason - A number of people jumped on our book simply stating, "YOU HAVE NO PROOF."
In the web link attached, we explain what we set out to do. Likewise our study was conducted only within the limits of our resources. Could we vet 121,000 sightings no we could. So we simply measured the frequency, distribution and shapes.
Proof we leave to someone with more resources.
Lately, the comment at the end of the NYT article, was stated wrong. We didn't say UFO reports were affected by news media reports. We told the reporter that the sighting reports were affected my growing access to Internet Broadband Media over the 15 years of the study. We clearly understand that some jumps in reporting were artifacts of reporting due to broadband. CACOSTA

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.